PCA Forums

I generally turn my computer and LCD monitor off at night during the because I won't be on it again for at least 20 hours. Yesterday, I went to turn it on and the bios posted then the screen suddenly went black. Then the Vista logo came up and disappeared quickly. Next, the Vista splash screen appeared and disappeared but the login screen never appeared. I rebooted and the same thing happened. For grins, I typed my password and could hear that Vista successfully booted-start up sound played etc. I then turned off everything and switched off the power to the PC. Once I turned it back on, everything was fine.

Tonight, same thing happened. Except this time, turning off the power to the PC didn't work. Even when I pressed delete to bring up my bios settings, the screen would appear and disappear quickly. I powered everything off and pulled my video card and ram. I then proceeded to clean all the contacts with CRC and reseated everything. Powered on and same #$%^& thing. So I cleared my bios, same thing. I pulled my video card out and moved it to the other PCI-x slot, same thing. I went and grabbed an old PCI video card and plugged it in (an old Graphics Blaster, 4 MB RAM, look out Fallout 3), and the same thing happened.

At this point I'm about to ram a screwdriver through the Motherboard. About this time last year, I had a MB go bad. I wanted to rule out the monitor so I hooked up my laptop and switched the LCD, it would come on and then go off. I thought this odd but wanted to make sure it wasn't the laptop not detecting the monitor so I hooked up my standby emergency PC; a P3 1GHz Gateway with 256 RAM. The monitor came on and the splash screens kept disappearing but I finally saw the desktop. Strange.

I then grabbed an old 17" KDS monitor and hooked it up to the computer that I thought I was having problems with and it worked. Since I reset the Bios, I got a reset error but the screen didn't go out. I hooked up the LCD monitor and now it's working.

So is my monitor going bad? Or is it something else.

By the way, all the hard power-off/on screwed up my Vista installation so I'll be reinstalling that this evening. If my computer is indeed bad, I'm seriously buying a dell or something, I'm sick of messing with my own stuff.

If there's anything else I should check, let me know.

The refresh rate or resolution may have gone out of wack & beyond the capabilities of either your video card or monitor. Boot into safe mode (F8 right after BIOS post) & reset them to something minimal (like 800x600 @ 60hz). If you can get into safe mode in the first place, you're monitor's probably fine. Reboot & see if it goes into Windows. If so, try changing the resolution up to what you are used to. Then try changing the frequency. This happens occasionally to some of the people I help & I'm not all together sure of the cause.

When the symptoms were occurring, I couldn't see anything. I would quickly hit delete to bring up the bios settings and once the screen came up, it would quickly disappear. I couldn't get the display to stay on long enough to even boot into safe mode.

At least the repair to Vista's registry seemed to work and I'm back in Vista. I still don't know what exactly is going on. The only thing I know to do is wait for it to happen again and then hook up another monitor. If it works, I'll know what's wrong. If it's not the monitor, there's going to be some parts for sale.